BullionVault experience

Hi all. I have a small question to people whom are also using BullionVault. I started accumulating gold at this online Bullion Dealer. I also tried Goldrepublic. It is a Dutch bullion dealer, but in my experience more expensive.

I was wondering if anyone has experience at Bullionvault? Also suggestions are welcome. I am debating whether I should just go with physical bullion or coins instead, or if it is okay to stick to this? Has anyone tried to withdraw money here? It seems like a trustworthy company. Just overall thoughts are nice.

Keeping physical gold/silver at home has it's advantages and disadvantages, as well has an online bullion dealer. It is nice to have my own, my love, my precious, metals.... ;-)

Look at www.GoldMadeSimple.com they can retail or store in allocated. Or you can store for now and take delivery at any point you like, much more transparent that bullionVault for delivery issues. Proper allocated insured storage, same as having a safe deposit box.

You can consider Goldmoney. I have accounts with both Bullionvault and Goldmoney. Both are dependable and more importantly, offer multiple locations for storage. So although I have some physical bullion in my home country, I also have some "offshore" in case I need to flee.

Personally I prefer Goldmoney because:

- I can take delivery of larger amounts of bullion with less hassle

- Goldmoney has more options to buy silver

- James Turk, when he used to work in HK, handled accounts for rich clients who needed "Last Plane Out" services i.e. if everything crashed in HK, they could access their assets safely somewhere else. I like that Goldmoney was set up by someone with that sort of experience.

I have just this week cashed out $2.5K of silver bullion from bullionvault. I bought it at £417 a kilo about a year ago and sold it for £719 on Monday :)

I am unable to fault the site, the service, the trade costs or the profit :)

My profits were delivered back into the account I delivered the funds from (internationally) within 48hrs of me clicking sell. I still have both gold and silver there and it is my principal place of online gold storage.

That said......If the net goes, so does BV i would imagine, so i do only keep as much there as I could (unhappily) see go up in a puff of smoke....as with all electronic gold and silver....if it ain't physical after TFLS it aint' real gold or silver.

I've been with Bullionvault for a while now, and I know others who use the service as well. For me it's part of a diversified alternative to using the Dutch pensionfunds.

Our experiences have been good. Depositing money through SEPA-transfers works swiftly, but we have no experience yet with withdrawing money. Overall, it looks like a reliable company.

Living downtown in a large city in one of the most densily populated regions of the world, I see no use of silver coins in a possible extreme scenario, and taking delivery and store quanties of metals at home doesn't seem appealing.

I believe one of the small differences between GoldMoney and Bullionvault is that you pay your GoldMoney storage fees in grammes BV storage fees in euro. However, Dutch citizens aren't eligible for a Goldmoney account anyway: http://www.goldmoney.com/private-customers.html

One matter of concern to me is, what would happen if the spot prices will rise (and perhaps later on drop) significantly in a short period of time. As Bullionvault is an internal market, I wonder whether their prices could theoretically disconnect from the spot prices.

p.s.

As you are dutch as well and if you consider a buy and hold strategy: buying coins means 19% VAT/BTW. With bullionvault you are exempted from the sales tax on silver (on a technicality, but still). As far as I understand it: Dutch tax law considers gold as money and taxes it as 'capital', the silver in you bullionvault is not money, but a 'base' commodity, and hence not capital.

I have been using BullionVault for a year now and I have transferred large sums both to and from my business current account without any problems whatsoever. In the UK depositors accounts are only protected up to £ 50K and with ZIRP I saw no value having cash in a bank that could fail given the parlous state they are all in.

There are times where the yield can be wider than one would like compared to spot prices as it is a closed market but I have found if you plan your sales when you need liquidity then you can get as good a price as any when you consider their commission prices to others.

One possible gripe is that the only method of funds transfer to your personal account is via CHAPS which costs £ 20 per transaction which is a high cost for small sales.

Hi Prana and others. Thanks for your responses. It seems that the Netherlands is not allowed to open an account at Goldmoney. After some research I prefered GoldMoney above BullionVault because you are also allowed to buy Palladium and Platinum. Good to hear people have good experiences with BullionVault. Untill GoldMoney is allowed or unless BullionVault allows for trading of Palladium and Platinum as well, I will stick to BullionVault. Goldrepublic is in my opinion a lot more expensive.

I have just this week cashed out $2.5K of silver bullion from bullionvault. I bought it at £417 a kilo about a year ago and sold it for £719 on Monday :)

I am unable to fault the site, the service, the trade costs or the profit :)

My profits were delivered back into the account I delivered the funds from (internationally) within 48hrs of me clicking sell. I still have both gold and silver there and it is my principal place of online gold storage.

That said......If the net goes, so does BV i would imagine, so i do only keep as much there as I could (unhappily) see go up in a puff of smoke....as with all electronic gold and silver....if it ain't physical after TFLS it aint' real gold or silver.

Cheers!!

fredquimby

What do you man, if the net goes? BV is offering allocated gold and as far as I know it is physical stored in a location of your choice, either in New York, London or Zurich. I like the fact that there is no hastle with physical PM's like insurance, safes and theft issues. A lot less hastle so it seems. It seems to have more pros than cons. Anyone else has a different oppinion as why I should also get physical at home?

There are quite a few providers of vaulted gold (allocated gold), BullionVault, GoldRepublic and GoldMoney are only some of them. Trustable Gold compares prices and ratings of providers. You can find the comparison under

I live in the UK. I've used Bullionvault for about 2 years with no problems whatsoever.

Bullionvault client money is held with either Lloyds or Bank Of America depending on where you live. Bullionvault hold their own money at Barclays. This makes comingling of client funds unlikely. Their daily audit of bullion held seems fairly tightly controlled too.

Given the state of the Eurozone and it's banking infrastructure though questions have to be asked about the safety of using services provided by any entity using banks in the region.

Here's what Adrian Ash of Bullionvault had to say in a thread on a UK forum yesterday.

Firstly in response to a post questioning their vaulting operations after some earlier discussion of what a collapse of Lloyds might mean for BV clients he said

Wrong. Sorry for the sales-pitch, but on BullionVault, the full allocation of physical metal is proven, each day, in public, for anyone to scrutinize:

No other bullion business does this. The Queen's Award for Enterprise Innovation we got in 2009 specifically cited it. The Daily Audit shows each user's holding, the sum total of which matches exactly to the formal bullion bar list, issued by the independent, third-party custodian (also published) and explicitly proving there is no double counting at the vault. We do the same with the Client Cash, and we also send independent assayers into the vaults each year to double-check the bars. Their report is published by our financial auditors - a site we couldn't hope to control - together with a detailed study they undertake of the Daily Audit procedure:

As for the safety of money held on deposit, other posters here are right - we've been given to believe that FSCS *may* apply, as it does to pooled Client Cash Accounts held for solicitors. If you're concerned, however, it's better to buy the metal - and get off bank risk entirely - rather than awaiting a decision which would only be made after the event.

​In a later post he added

Well, if the Client Cash Account went, it wouldn't be fun. That's why client cash is held at call, so we can move or repay it all within 24 hours. Alternative facilities have stood ready since early summer 2007, and if we felt it prudent to move, we would. There'd be no need for users to revalidate, because BullionVault holds client info, not the bank -- separating record-keeping from storage in just the way we do with the metal.

I shan't guess at what would happen to cash frozen in the old account, nor how long it would take to resolve. But pending user deposits into the new pooled account, BullionVault could fund it immediately (our operational bank account is held at Barclays, to avoid the banks confusing client for business money). So we'd continue to bid, effectively aggregating user sales into main market trades as we then sold whole bars. (This already happens when users are net sellers.) Like BullionVault, all users have the same right to deal onto main market too, although they do need whole units of main-market bullion to sell. Everyone has a further right of withdrawal, not just 400-oz gold. See T&C and the Tariff on Help for costs etc.

I know most people here are based in the US and so shouldn't be directly affected by a Lloyds or Barclays crash. I think that any cash in their Bullionvault account would be lodged with Bank Of America. A Lloyds collapse would mean a much thinner trading market as many European users have difficulties with their frozen cash and lack confidence to deposit fresh funds. A Barclays failure means Bullionvault themselves are prevented from buying until they have sold some of their own physical and attained some liquidity again.

Lloyds is majority owned by the the UK taxpayer/government though and has the power of a big printer backing it.

The FSCS mentioned is the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme to which financial institutions contribute in order to payout to customers of failed institutions in the event of their collapse. There is some doubt that in the event of systemic failure of several large banks there would be enough money in the pot to meet it's obligations. There is also doubt about whether the UK government would print to make up any shortfall in the FSCS funds as they suggested they would during the 2008 crisis.

Apologies for the highlighting. This is from searching the linked forum thread for keywords in order to find the relevant posts.

The Royal Canadian Mint is now starting to sell gold receipts which can be redeemed for physical. Also as of the 29th they will be trading shares on the TSX.

Royal Canadian Mint will begin trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange as an industrial issuer at the open on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011, according to the TSX. As in an Oct. 28, 2011, Royal Canadian Mint news release, it will sell about $250-million of the receipts for $20 each. The buyer of a receipt will own the actual gold, rather than a unit or share of the mint. The receipts will be listed in both Canadian and U.S. dollars and can be traded in either currency. The TSX reports the receipts will trade under the symbols MNT and MNT.U, and Cusip No. 779921 10 5. The receipts are redeemable at the option of the holder once a month for cash or gold bullion, beginning on Feb. 15, 2012, and on the 15th day of each month thereafter. The mint will use the money raised to buy gold bullion on behalf of the purchasers of the exchange-traded receipts

The ETR Holders' gold will not be allocated but rather will be unallocated within the general supply of
physical gold within the Mint's refinery and production operations.
The Mint intends to use the physical gold owned by ETR Holders within its general refinery and
production operations and as such it will not be held separate and stored separately from other unallocated
gold bullion held at the Mint, as is done for certain gold customers on a fully allocated basis. The Mint
believes it can manage its unallocated gold in a manner that fully protects the ownership and related rights
of ETR Holders. However, unallocated gold under the custodial care of the Mint, including the
unallocated gold of ETR Holders, will not be held separately or audited or inspected on a stand-alone
basis.
In the event that any of the gold held by the Mint on an unallocated basis is subject to non-compensable
loss, damage or destruction, all owners of such unallocated gold, including both ETR Holders and non-
ETR Holders, will be subjected to such loss on a pro rata basis.

I just signed up today to bullionvault, seems to be just what I'm looking for. I have allocated storage in Switzerland but the fees are more than BV is charging. I'll keep it but it's nice to have somewhere to trade without leverage. (Forex sucks) Looking forward to getting my account credited and starting to buy.

I've also heard good reports about Bullionvault, they have super low trading and storage fees, however I would keep a core position in physical coins or bars and use a Bullionvault account as a back up or for trading. You don't want all your bullion eggs in one basket. :)

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